Recently in leaves Category

It had been raining for days and the previous night's storm was pretty windy, so I thought maybe the leaves had just been blown out of place. I tried to flip one over, only to find that my fingers were covered with sticky stuff! The leaf had this thin layer of white sticky stuff that was causing it to curl.

I figured this was the work of some sort of bug, became totally grossed out and ran off to wash my hands thoroughly. Once I felt clean again, I did a little searching on the internet and determined that the buggies on my twig might have been aphids. Apparently the aphids suck plant juices (sap?) out of the leaf, which can cause the leaves to curl. While they're eating, the aphids kind of poop this white liquidy stuff called honeydew, which stays on the leaves making them sticky. This all seems very yucky (and has ruined honeydew melon for me forever), but apparently some other bugs love the honeydew. Some bees produce a special type of honey from it and some ants actually collect it directly from the aphids. Eww. Here's a gross picture of a couple of ants collecting honeydew from feeding aphids. You can see some honeydew bubbles on a few of the aphids.

picture from wikipedia

Luckily, I haven't seen any of these bugs on my tree and the curled leaves returned to normal by the next day.



But just this morning, I spotted another little patch of honeydew.

Eek.

Middle leaf, May 23rd: 2 1/8".

Middle leaf, May 25th: 2 1/8".

Harumpf.

Little leaf, May 18th: 5/8".

Little leaf: May 23rd...

No, not that big one on the top, the tiny one below. Hey, why is the other leaf in the pair so big now? They started out the same!

Little leaf, May 25th: uh, 5/8".

Grrr. Well, at least the big leaf is growing...

Large leaf, May 18th: 6 1/8".

Large leaf, May 25th: 6 3/4".

Alright! That's what I'm talking about!

So apparently my other two leaves are on vaca or something. What gets me is that all the leaves come in pairs and the other leaf in each pair is growing strong. Are these on the wrong side (the house side instead of the street side)? Are they getting less sun? I refuse to be worried, though, because there is so much overall growth on my twig that I actually have trouble finding my leaves these days!

Can you believe that's the same twig that we met back in February?!

Two months later, on April 25th, flowers and the very beginnings of leaves added dots of yellow-green to my view of the houses across the way.

By May 2nd, the leaves on my tree and the tree across the street had started to hide the neighbors' windows from view.

Dramatic changes came fast after that. By May 6th, the leaves were large enough to hang over the branches and cover the buds they'd popped out of.

And on the 12th, I could barely see the sidewalk anymore.

Then the green just got thicker. (May 18th)

And thicker. (May 23rd)



Bye neighbors! See you in the fall.

This ash is a good two or three weeks ahead of the others on the street. It looks fully developed, whereas mine definitely looks like it's still just getting started.



Now that the leaves are arriving, I can tell just how many of the branches on my tree are dead. There are whole sections, maybe a third of the tree, that remain completely bare.

I wonder if my tree will ever fill out like the ash down the street.
I wonder how the honey locusts will look when they have all their leaves.
I wonder when the horse chestnut will lose its flowers and begin to drop chestnuts all over the street.
I wonder when the birds will return to their nest and when they will leave it again.

How cute is that?! It's like highlights! This must be new growth. You can even spot some little brown bud-like bits at the base of the new growth. I wonder how similar their development is to the deciduous trees I've been following?

Elsewhere in trees-that-do-not-behave-like-the-ones-I've-been-watching are the weirdest trees on my street: the honey locusts. At least I think they are honey locusts. They have been the slowest trees to start blooming around here and are just starting to get their leaves now. At the end of April, when my tree was full of pollen-covered flowers and the Norway maples were bringing bright green to the whole neighborhood, they looked like this...



The honey locusts have these uneven zigzag branches that make them look super creepy. They remind me of the spooky forest that Dora the Explorer constantly has to tiptoe through to get to the other side. In the winter, they looked almost pitch black.



Honey locusts are actually even creepier than this. Regular honey locust trees have thorns. And not like little rose thorns. These are big, menacing thorns that look like something from the age of the dinosaurs (which they very well may be!).



The variety that is planted for shade in the city is thornless, however. Earlier this month, I spotted a honey locust a few blocks away that had started developing its leaves a little earlier than the ones on my street and noticed that it too had thorns. Only on the branches though, thank goodness!



Even if they aren't growing thorns out of their trunks, the honey locusts around me are growing small twigs (like the one above) and flowers and leaves directly out of the trunk. Here's one honey locust a block away from me back at the end of April.



The little buds are coming straight out of the trunk! They seem to be coming out at spots where there are these knots. I wonder if they have created the knots by repeatedly sprouting here or if they are growing here because the bark is somehow different here. And it's not just this tree. All the honey locusts have these buds growing on the trunk. Even the youngest one.



Three weeks later, the little buds have developed into leaves and flowers.



These are the same leaves and flowers that are growing up in the branches. I just can't get over the fact that they are growing down here as well. There's something about this kind of tree, it seems, that just wants to grow wacky stuff out of everywhere.

The honey locust has long compound leaves with what looks like 15 or so leaflets and I know from my kids tree id book that it makes the crazy long seedpods (up to 18" long!) that we see all over the sidewalks around here in the fall.


 
It's a weird tree. For more about the honey locust, check out this post from BiologyDude.

Today, it's just over 2".



That's amazingly steady growth -- about 1/8" every two days. But it's slower growth than I noticed last week, which was about 1/8" every day. Wanna see how it's slightly slowing down?

Judging from this leaf, I might guess that a leaf's growth slows down as it gets larger, but when we take a look at the large leaf right by my window, we see something different. This big leaf was 4 1/2" long on May 9th.

And 5 1/4" on May 12th.



It grew to 5 3/4" by May 14th.

And was 6" long this morning.

Wow! Let's see that in a graph!


Again, my measuring system isn't exactly precise, but there's no doubting that the big leaf is getting bigger faster than the smaller leaf. Interestingly, both seemed to slow down in the last few days. You can see the slopes on their graphs aren't as steep from the 14th to the 16th in particular. I wonder if everything on the tree slowed down in the last few days because the weather changed to cool temps, clouds and rain. Look at this awesome graph that I found at timeanddate.com of Boston's weather in the last week ....

Maybe not the most inspiring weather for growing leaves. Could this have caused that slowdown in leaf growth?

I wonder how a tree deals with long periods of clouds anyway. Doesn't sun mean food? But clouds mean rain, which is also important....

A very hungry caterpillar?

I haven't ever spotted any critters, but they must be there somewhere!

I'm assuming that this is all completely normal. I don't see why a few holes on a few leaves should cause a major problem for the tree. And these leaves don't look sick, just munched on. I'll be keeping an eye open for more signs of hungry insects in the tree and their impact on its leaves.

The leaf I'm measuring only has 5 leaflets!  The other leaves in this cluster also only have 5, except for the one at the bottom left, which has 7. Now I'm starting to notice more and more leaves with 5 leaflets.



I can't really discern a pattern. Sometimes the 5-leaflet leaves are the inner/smaller leaves on a shoot, sometimes they're the outer/larger leaves.

And they aren't always in pairs. Sometimes a cluster will have just one leaf with a different number of leaflets.

I suppose they still might all develop into leaves with 7 leaflets, but I'm beginning to doubt that all the leaves on a tree will have the exact same number of leaflets. Now I know why the tree id books and sites talk about "5 to 9" or "7 to 11" leaflets. Here's a description from a leaf tree key found on this site.

On May 3rd, the shoot at the end of the twig closest to my living room window measured about 2" tall from the tippy top of the center leaves back down to the twig. Two days later, on May 5th...

...it looked to be about 2 1/2" long, although I'm not quite sure I was holding the measuring tape at the same spot at the top. (I do my best to get the tape in place before I get the camera, but it's tricky doing all this hanging out my living room window.)

The very next day (May 6th)...

 
...I measured it at 2 3/4" from the top point of the leaves to the base. And two days later, on the 8th...



...3 3/4"?! Hmmmm, that seems like a lot. Suddenly, I'm wondering if I'm measuring the growth of the shoot or the growth of those leaves at the top. I may have to approach this question a little differently....

If I look back at the pictures above and focus only on the section of the measuring tape that is between the spot where the highest leaves branch off from the shoot and the top of the twig, I think I can actually discern some growth in the shoot itself.



In the picture from May 3rd (above), I count four 1/4" segments, so 1" total height. In the picture from May 6th (below), I can see five 1/4" segments, so 1 1/4" total height.



That's 1/4" difference in three days. And two days later, I count six 1/4" segments, which means another 1/4" of growth!



If this is in fact the growth of the shoot, it would mean that it is getting taller about about the same rate (1/8" per day), or perhaps a little more slowly, than the leaves are getting longer.

I will keep measuring this shoot to try to verify this estimate. But I wonder how long the shoot will continue to grow? I assume that the leaves will reach their full length at some point in the summer, but could the shoot keep growing beyond that? When does all this growth stop and the tree start to shift to fall?